Retrospective

As Education Week marks its 20th
anniversary, here are some of the people, events, and issues that were
making news 20 years ago.

Selected stories from March 10, 1982:

The American Teacher: The National Education Association
releases The Status of
the American Public School Teacher, 1980-81, the sixth in a
series of portraits of the public school teacher the nea has issued
every five years since 1956. The report says the average teacher is
older and has spent more time in college than was the case in 1976. The
union also found that a teacher in 1981 was far less likely to choose
teaching as a career if given a second chance than was the case five
years earlier.

Fed Up: Superintendents are becoming increasingly frustrated with their
boards, and that dissatisfaction is making the chiefs more likely
to quit their jobs, according to a study presented at the American
Association of School Administrators' convention in New Orleans. The
survey of more than 1,300 superintendents found that 15 percent of the
respondents cited conflicts with their former school boards and the
growing tendency of boards to be uncooperative as key reasons they left
their previous jobs for their current positions.

Bigger Bucks: The legislature in Vermont, a state whose
schools have been among the most reliant in the nation on local
property taxes, appears ready to enact a bill that would boost state aid to
schools by 50 percent. With state aid accounting for about 25
percent of the average district's general operating revenues (excluding
federal revenue), Vermont ranks 46th in the nation in state spending
for schools.

Selective Closings?: The Maryland state board of education is
asked to decide whether the Montgomery County school board's selection
of schools to be closed was
intended to thwart intergration. Montgomery County, a Washington
suburb, was one of the first and largest districts in the country to
adopt an integration plan without having been ordered to do so.

Measuring Equity: To advance its goal of "making schools more responsive to
the needs of women and girls," the Council for Women in Independent
Schools plans to devise a survey instrument, or "equity audit," to help
independent schools measure their progress in providing equity for
their students and employees. The idea is to encourage schools to
examine and correct disparities in the way they treat women and girls
and men and boys.

Nuclear Knowledge:More than 220 teachers from
Boston area meet on the Lesley College campus in Cambridge, Mass.,
to discuss "Educating for Responsibility in a Nuclear Age." The
meeting—believed by its sponsors to be the first of its kind in
the country— was convened, organizers say, to help teachers
examine their role in making students aware of the dangers and
implications of the nuclear-arms race.

Historic Opposition: Rallying against the policies of a
president for the first time in its 85-year history, the National PTA
joins efforts of other advocacy groups to fight against the Reagan
administration's proposed fiscal 1983 education budget. "With 6
million grassroots members, this is an organization that Congress wants
to hear from and can't ignore," says Mary Ann Leveridge, the
association's president.

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